WebDuck Designs has been renting dedicated servers from Hostgator for almost 10 years. During the last 10 years a lot of things have changed over at Hostgator and from our personal experience none of those changes have been for the better.

In the beginning when we needed an issue addressed or an SSL certificate installed, all we needed to do was create a support ticket and the issue was resolved within a couple of hours. Even complex issues like PCI compliancy were handled quickly. In the last three years everything has changed. Getting an SSL certificate installed took almost a week from the time we created the ticket to the time it was installed. Even after it was installed, we had several instances where the SSL certificate needed to be installed again because it was not installed correctly the first time. When our server was found to not be PCI compliant due to out of date software and other issues it took Hostgator support over a month to just LOOK at the support ticket. The end result was they were unable to make the server PCI compliant without having to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.

The biggest issue we dealt with and probably the best example of how far downhill Hostgator support has gone is when they migrated one of our servers to a new "box" back in 2012. The process was only supposed to take two or three hours. Our particular migration took almost 48 hours. During that time period we made phone calls every two hours to support asking what the problem was. Each time we received the same answer which was that everything looked fine. After 36 hours of our server being down we finally got ahold of a support manager and that person said that the server had become "unresponsive" and asked if I would like to start the process over again. Then to make matters even worse, when the server was finally done being migrated every one of the new IP addresses assigned to the server were blacklisted on just about every email blacklist on the planet. It took over a month to make it so that emails going out of that server were not bouncing back.

In July of 2015 we decided we could not afford to deal with the constant problems associated with renting dedicated servers from Hostgator and after a lot of research and careful consideration we decided to rent dedicated servers from Godaddy. In an effort to avoid future problems and to ensure that we could provide our clients with the highest level of customer support, we chose to spend the extra $1,000 for each server and get them "fully managed".

After only a month of using Godaddy, I can tell you first hand that the customer service and technical support is dramatically superior to anything I ever dealt with at Hostgator. The fully managed server team is on call 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. I have already called them countless times while setting up the new server and migrating sites over from the old servers and each time I called I was speaking to an actual technical support engineer who immediately addressed any issues or made any changes I required while I was on the phone. Another big difference between Hostgator and Godaddy support is when I call Godaddy I am speaking to a tech support engineer within two minutes. When I would call Hostgator I would be talking to an "operator" after a 20 to 30 minute hold time and then that person was only a middle man that read from a cue card.

Is Godaddy perfect? I don't know and it's way to early to tell at this point in time. What I can say for sure is that after all the problems we have dealt with from Hostgator, working with Godaddy has been an appreciated breath of fresh air. We look forward to working with Godaddy to provide the best possible service for our clients for years to come.